His basic points are: (1) one needs to memorize basic math facts (addition and multiplication tables) in order to do higher order math. The reason is to free up working memory for the higher order concepts. If you need to calculate the multiplication, you don’t have any working memory left over to do more complicated things. (2) Practice such as flash cards are good to increase memory recall speed and strengthen the memorization, but they don’t work unless the student has already memorized the fact. He mentions an astounding experiment—a group of kids played a math game for 10 minutes a day for a semester, all about multiplication facts. They loved this game, you couldn’t tear the kids away. At the end of the semester, their math fact memorization had not improved at all. They were just much faster at counting on their fingers. The problems was trying to develop speed before establishing the fact into working memory. (3) To get facts into working memory, you need to repeat a small set of facts–two or three. (4) You can assess fluency by measuring the time to answer a math problem. They use 0.8 seconds. Don’t forget to subtract out overhead such as keyboarding time. (5) It’s important to measure each math fact rather than the average because kids have an easy time with facts involving 0, 1, 2, 3, and doubling. If you measure the average, a student who is very fast at the easy facts can mask that they are slow with the other facts. (6) So FASTTMath will work on just two math facts, measuring response time until they are memorized, and the let the student proceed to a flash-card type game to speed up their recall time.

The overall process for learning fluency is: (1) Understand the concept. (2) Move a few facts into working memory — memorize two or three pieces of info. (3) Move the fact into long term memory—practice known facts with a longer and longer gap between recalls, i.e. 1 sec, 2, 4, 8 sec, etc. FASTTMath fills the gaps with practice on older, established facts to do two things at once. This is okay because the older established facts to not put a load on working memory. (4) Repeat with more bits of info.

I remember when I was learning math—I hated memorization and indeed to this day I do poorly on the math portions of Brain Age. At the time I felt memorization was not a useful skill and my time would be better spent on learning general concepts. This talk has convinced me otherwise. Although I have to say, I’m still reluctant to take the time to memorize my math facts even today. Old habits die hard.

He mentions the use of Skill Chains from this article. Skill Chains are basically a flowchart of the different skills a player encounters and must master to progress through the game. With respect to educational games, it is a great way to map the educational goals to the gameplay. In the past we’ve generally used tables of skills and how they map into the game. The flow-chart nature of skill chains is superior to tables because the tables imply a linear progression through the skills. Games however are usually not linear and the skill-chains show that.

I’ve heard of James Gee all over the place but I’ve never delved into his ideas before. I stumbled upon this interview with him on Edutopia and he very succinctly describes how video games are little learning environments.

My friend Lois Huang just told me about an excellent book—The Seven Laws of Teaching by John Milton Gregory. Published in 1884, the seven laws are things every teacher knows such as “Never begin a class exercise until the attention of the class has be secured.” But the way Gregory lays them all out simply and concisely is very useful, and his discussions of the various facets and implications of his laws make it essential.

Later in the book, Gregory talks more about the mind of the learner such as: “The pupil must reproduce in his own mind the truth to be learned.” This idea is the essence of constructivism which I suppose Piaget was formulating at around the same time (late 1800’s). And this is exactly what I’m working on in our educational video games. The work is to translate these ideas about teaching into the realm of video games. The seven laws are about how a teacher and learner work together. But a video game can’t watch and understand the student like a teacher can. It does however have infinite patience, and always works one-on-one with the student.

Scott Brodie in writes Gamasutra about creating more meaning in games by using life experience, distilling it to a core truth, and building your game around that. Brodie applies this idea for making games more fun, but it could be used to make games more educational as well such as mathematics or problem solving.

GameCareer.com has an article by Lindsay Grace in Educational Fantasy. This articles explores the idea of the fantasy setting and its necessary role in creating an engaging and entertaining experience. “[Fantasy] is probably one of the greatest single challenges facing educational game design. How can the practical matters of education intersect the enveloping fantasy we expect from games?” The examples of Logo, Oregon Trail and Fantasy Football reminds the reader that educational messages are more exciting in an enhanced and engrossing setting.

This NY Times article portrays a lawyer who worked 20 years helping inmates on death row. He gave up a high salary to become a middle school teacher “having seen too many people at the end of lives gone wrong, and wanting to keep these students from ending up like his former clients. He quotes Frederick Douglass: ‘It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.'”

This article is a pleasant reminder that teachers affect society is so many ways.

Here is an interesting paper written by the designers of the educational game Europe-2045. The game is a simulation of the economies and politics of the European Union and the project was to develop a computer game for use in high school. The authors summarize prior research in educational games, and then discuss their experiences from developing their game. Some of the notable conclusions:

In a classroom, some students and teachers are eager to use games for learning, but others do not like it. There might be a preference among people for an exploratory style of learning, while others like the traditional explanation and then practice format.

There was a wide disparity of how much students could grasp. Perhaps due to previous video game experience, some students understood the complexities of the simulation, while others did not. Are these first two conclusions related?

Visual storytelling was very effective for engagement in the game. A necessary ingredient though was having the players choices affect the outcome. The player quickly realized when their decisions didn’t change the story, and they lost interest.

How the teacher framed the game and reflected on the game’s lessons had a huge impact on how well students transferred their understanding to the real world.